| Language had always been woefully denoted as a sort of purely neutral medium for communication, rather in practice, certain forms of which would be selected in preference according to the writers’ or speakers’ corresponding communicative objectives, especially in the news discourse. Critical Discourse Analysis, as a feasible discourse analytical method to reveal how the discursive sources of power, dominance, inequality and bias are enacted, reproduced and resisted within specific social, political and historical contexts. With the help of CDA, it is manifested that news discourse is ideological without true objectivity and fairness as the mass media claims.This thesis has selected 40 pieces of news reports on the catastrophe of MH370, 20 from China Daily, the others from New York Times. The catastrophe of MH370 has been paid much heed all over the world and reported frequently from its causes to the search and rescue efforts.In this thesis, a contrastive analysis of the news discourses on Malaysia airlines flight MH370 extracted from China Daily and New York Times is conducted with Fairclough’s three-dimensional framework as the theoretical basis and Halliday’s systemic functional grammar as the analytical tool, aiming to reveal the similarities as well as disparities of the linguistic features between two countries’ news reports and, more vitally, make transparent the social determinants and hidden ideologies from the perspectives of transitivity, modality, reporting modes and lexical choice revolving in two stages, namely description, interpretation, and as for the last stage, explanation, reveals social determination in production and interpretation.It is found that these two agencies do share different language features as well as hidden intentions, such as transitivity. Transitivity are utilized frequently by these two agencies to present the news to the public, among which material process and verbal process overwhelm the others greatly. Through an intensive study on transitivity, similarities and disparities are transparently perceived that no matter China Daily and New York Times are both endeavoring to pursue for objectivity and fairness on the attitudes and efforts of Malaysian parts, while the American agency are trying to whitewash the American Boeing company and dodge its responsibilities through material process. Besides, New York Times depicts an incompetent, irresponsible and even mendacious image of the Chinese airport staff through verbal process.In addition, from the perspective of lexical choice, positive verbs and adjectives are both applied in these two agencies to depict a vivid picture of related countries’ all-out efforts, practical actions, and immediate response towards this catastrophe, while a trick was played by the subtle use of past future tense in American news reports to imply that China did not give any practical response even though the search and rescue mission was so urgent, through which a vicious intention to destabilize China and infuriate the readers against Chinese government was perceived.What’s more, in the terms of modality, modal auxiliaries of high value in China Daily outnumbered its counterpart, which does not manifest that China Daily is not as objective as New York Times. And instead, a determination of Chinese government to mobilize all forces to fulfill its search and rescue mission was demonstrated by China Daily, while New York Times poured its scorn on the efforts that China made through a rare usage of ‘must’. As for reporting modes, it is found through quantitative analysis that the usage of indirect speech outnumbered the others, especially in New York Times for its sake of more intervention.Thus, CDA is indeed verified as a feasible and effective research method for discourse analysis, especially combined with contrastive analysis. Besides, disaster news such as the news reports on MH370 air crash in this thesis are produced and reported ideologically. |
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